Buckley Voting for Obama

This is old news by now, but it's new to me. Christopher Buckley,
son of William F., has declared
his intention to vote for Obama over McCain. Says he concerning McCain:

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, "We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us." This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget "by the end of my first term." Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain---who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

I've read both of Obama's books. I believe he's smart and decent.
I've hoped, like Buckley, that if elected Obama will be smart enough
to avoid the pitfalls of Democratic party thinking.

This is, of course, dangerous ground. Hoping that someone will be
smart enough not to follow the policies of the Democratic party into
hell is a poor bet. Especially since Obama has shown little
independence from them over the course of his time in the Senate or
during his campaign. Still, given the polls today, it's likely that
hoping for sanity is our best bet--poor or not.